Donald Trump’s Hotel We Can Believe In

At the opening of his new D.C. hotel, Donald Trump professed an optimism that has been absent on the campaign trail.

Photograph by Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg via Getty

“Today is a metaphor,” Donald Trump said yesterday morning, at a ceremony dedicating the new Trump Hotel in Washington, a renovation of the gorgeous Old Post Office, five blocks from the White House. His daughter Ivanka had already described the pains the Trump Organization had taken to preserve the “intricate stone carvings” and the “extraordinary millwork” of the 1899 building. The C.E.O. of Trump Hotels, Eric Danziger, described himself, winningly, as a “former bellman,” mentioned that two couples had already been married in the hotel, and provided a lesson in the origin of the word “Welcome,” which, he said, derived from an “old innkeeping term that means ‘it is well that you come.’" The ballroom looked expansive and the bar grand; it seemed a very nice place to stay.

Trump spent most of the press conference standing farther from the podium than his children or Danziger, not making himself conspicuous. When he took the mike, it turned out that the metaphor he had in mind was about the Presidency. “So many parts of our country are in a state of disrepair,” he said. “These are spaces that have no hope, have no future, but you need imagination and you need the ability to get them done.” It was like the real-estate business. “My job is to look at undeveloped spaces and imagine what they could be.”

There have been enough moments like this, when the campaign is diverted into a brand promotion, that reporters were grumpy about the hotel presser well before it began. You begin the day under the impression that you are documenting the conditions under which America considers authoritarianism, and you spend it attending a promotion for a perfectly nice-looking golf course or hotel. The real question was who was the greater dupe: the press, which ended up covering the thing, or the Republican Party, which, with thirteen days to go in the race, had a nominee with more important things to do than campaign. But the event, once it began, also contained a more forlorn kind of play, in which Trump seemed to be trying to white-out a few dark words from his political obituary and replace them with terms such as “optimist.”

“The future lies with the dreamers, not the cynics,” Trump said. In the context of his candidacy, this is an extraordinary thing to say. For months, Hillary Clinton’s campaign has cultivated the image of a mean Trump, cooped up in a shiny tower, gazing out at a country he cannot help but despise. (As the Democrats have not ceased to point out, Trump has, since the nineteen-eighties, been saying that the rest of the world is “laughing at us.”) Standing in his new ballroom, the candidate seemed to be insisting on a rebuke. “The United States is great. It’s great. Its people are great,” Trump said. “All I see is untapped potential waiting to be set free.” If, at the Republican Convention, Trump had insisted that “I alone can fix it,” now he envisioned a more coöperative role. “We have to choose the most optimistic path,” he said. “I’m asking America to join me in dreaming big and bold.” If only Trump could open a new hotel every day.

For now, it seems like Trump’s legacy will be shaped by the opposition ads, both the ones that capture his hateful flailing and the ones with a more plaintive tone. Yesterday, the political action group Save the Day, founded by the filmmaker Joss Whedon, released an ad that followed a family through an ordinary day, which happens to be this November 8th. The father operates a taco truck; the mother, in a maid’s uniform, stands in a mansion’s kitchen unloading groceries; an older son slides open the door of a bodega; a younger daughter, in school, gives a charm bracelet to a soldier who is there to speak to her class. None of them goes to the polls. All through the day, the news suggests that turnout is low. Finally, the family, looking anxious, gathers around a television while the announcer says that America has elected “a new President.” The little girl says to her father, “Papi, can we stay?”

Trump’s optimistic language in his new Washington ballroom is striking partly because it sounds familiar: it is the language of business Republicans, of Mitt Romney four years ago. This time around, it belonged to Jeb Bush, with his hopeful, ridiculous insistence that we could soon return to four-per-cent annual economic growth. For voters in the Republican primaries, that message was dead on arrival. Trump must know that it was his cynicism that won him the nomination. Today may have been a metaphor, but it wasn’t a very instructive one. Maybe Trump’s cynicism derives from many years of profiting from people’s fantasies, or maybe its source lies deeper in the man himself. He may see the best in undeveloped lots, but he sees the worst in people.

Political campaigns are personal, especially at the end. In 2012, Barack Obama, filled with nostalgia, wept at his last rally; Mitt Romney, stalked by the idea that he had not done enough, scheduled last-minute events. Four years earlier, John McCain devoted his concession speech to praise for his opponent. The Presidential race right now is in a rare moment of stasis: the polls suggest the outcome is nearly certain, many votes are already in, and yet there are two weeks to go. What is left to the candidates is not to make a case for their movements but to make a case for themselves.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells began contributing to The New Yorker in 2006 and joined the magazine as a staff writer in 2015. He writes mainly about American politics and society.